Fawn Weaver: The Rise of Uncle Nearest

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the FoST podcast. Today’s guest, Fawn Weaver, is an inspiring trailblazer, a one-of-a-kind entrepreneur and a gifted storyteller. She’s the CEO and founder of Uncle Nearest Inc, the producers of the most awarded bourbon and whiskey on the market. Since founding the company in 2017, fawn has led Uncle Nearest to become not only the top-selling African-American founded spirits brand of all time, but the fastest growing whiskey brand in American history with a current value estimated by Forbes of over $1 billion. Fawn is here today to talk with me about her new book, Love & Whiskey, which my team and I at Melcher Media are proud to have helped bring to life. It’s not only the story of Fawn’s company, but also of the person who inspired its creation: Nathan “Nearest” Green, the formerly enslaved Black man who taught Jack Daniels how to make Tennessee whiskey and became his first master distiller. For her book, Fawn extensively researched and beautifully recounts the history and friendship between Jack and Nearest and the amazing influence that it would have on their families, their community, and eventually on Fawn herself, leading her to build such a remarkable spirits business. Fawn’s company and her book are a testament to the power of a great story. It’s an incredible honor to have her on the podcast to discuss how her part of that story unfolded and how she’s now sharing it with the world. Please join me in extending a warm welcome to Fawn Weaver.

Fawn Weaver, welcome to the Future of Storytelling podcast. I’ve so been looking forward to having you on the show. Welcome.

Fawn Weaver:

Thank you for having me, Charlie.

Charlie Melcher:

This is going to be so fun. So let me start by saying that most companies, they start with a good idea. Yours, it started with a story. Can you tell us about that article that you read that eventually led to creating Uncle Nearest?

Fawn Weaver:

Absolutely. It was on the cover of the New York Times International Edition. I was in Singapore when it came out, and there was a photo, and it was the photo that grabbed my attention before the headline. And the photo was an image of Jack Daniel. He was surrounded by his leadership team. By all accounts, the image looked like it was taken in the 19th century—we now know it’s circa 1904—and seated to his immediate right was a Black man. That would’ve been highly abnormal during that period of time. And actually, and it’s in the book, it’s how I begin the book, what New York Times was using was a cropped image, but when you look at the full image, he hadn’t just put a Black man to his right. He actually ceded the center position of the entire photo to the Black man. So we now know Jack was making a statement, but at the time that I came across the article, I just found it fascinating that the person seated to his immediate right was Black.

And then the headline read, “Jack Daniels embraces a hidden ingredient: help from a slave.” But the article itself didn’t dive too deep. It was what reporters, what journalists use a lot called a lob, and they lob up the ball, they get what they can get on whatever budget or timeframe that they have. They write essentially the framework of a story. They lob it up and they hope that someone will take the ball, finish the play. And Clay Risen, the New York Times reporter who did it, said this was the first time in the history of his career and he had lobbed up many times that someone actually took the ball and finished the play. So once I began Googling and trying to find anything online, there was nothing there either. As a matter of fact, there wasn’t even a Wikipedia page that eventually popped up hours later.

But originally there was really nothing about Nearest Green, the first known African-American master distiller, who we now know to be the teacher of a young Jack Daniel, who we now know to be the first master distiller for Jack Daniel Distillery Number Seven. And that story though, that headline in that photo was taken immediately by Black Twitter and Black Twitter decided that Jack Daniel was a slave owner. He stole the recipe, he hid the slave. I mean, they did that within hours. What began circulating around the world very quickly was a false narrative. Understandably, I don’t really knock Black Twitter for this because when has a story like this ever turned out to be positive? You have an enslaved man who taught a white boy how to do something, and then that white boy goes on to be an extraordinary success, and we don’t know who this African-American man is. Those stories don’t usually turn out the way that this one has turned out, which has turned out to be a remarkable story of love, honor, and respect.

Charlie Melcher:

So you read this article, it piques your interest. What do you do?

Fawn Weaver:

Once the Wikipedia page came up, there was a book that was referenced called “Jack Daniel’s Legacy.” It was published in 1967, and it was a white reporter from Tuscaloosa, Alabama who came to Lynchburg, Tennessee to write the definitive biography of Jack Daniel and who he interviewed were all the people around Jack. They were the people that knew him best. His nephew, who he turned the distillery over to was interviewed his great nephews who were running the distillery at that time, and just people from Lynchburg, the elders, people who really truly knew it. And when I received the book and saw that, not only was his name mentioned from very early on, but so were his boys, George and Eli. And so now we’ve got a different kind of story because you have his mentor Nearest Green, his first master distiller and Nearest’s sons being mentioned more times than Jack’s own family.

But there’s certain parts of the book where if you read between the lines, the level of respect that is being given to Uncle Nearest is greater than that of Uncle Jack. And so there was a level of respect there that I thought was extraordinary considering where the reporter was from the timeframe in which the book was being written and published. I mean, 1967 is the height of the civil rights era. Can you imagine how people reading that would have taken it, that there was a black person included so many times? And so the idea that the entire world saw this story one way, and I saw it another way, I believe is what drew me in, is that I had the opportunity to take a story that people had determined was negative, but I believed was positive and see if I could prove that.

Charlie Melcher:

So I know the story, you then actually get yourself to Lynchburg, Tennessee and you start meeting the descendants of both Nearest Green and Jack Daniel. Paint a quick picture for listeners to understand what that investigative research just looked like as you were starting to get into writing a book about it.

Fawn Weaver:

Well, when you’re going into a small town, the thing about a small town is they are not going to talk to anyone they don’t trust. They will not speak to outsiders. You really can’t come with a list of questions. You can’t come with anything other than, Hey, can we get together? Can we meet? And then recording it on a phone, which is what I did, but allowing the conversation to just let the stories flow. I never had specific questions that I showed up with. I always came to hear the stories and then my questions were formed from listening to the stories that they naturally told because there was no way that I was going to be able to write this story if as an outsider I didn’t very quickly become an insider.

Charlie Melcher:

So that research ultimately led to this new book you’ve just released, “Love & Whiskey,” and I have to take a moment of full disclosure and say that Mera Media is very honored to have been your publishing partner on this project. And for our listeners, we’ve just been incredibly blessed to be able to be along with you on the ride. It’s amazing the quality of this book. It’s such a great read. And I’m not saying that just because I’m your publisher. I read it first before we agreed to be involved, so to make sure it was the real McCoy. So from this process, you discovered all of these things about Nearest Green and the important role that he played in the history of spirits in our country, and you decided that you wanted to honor him and his legacy. And most people who want to do something like that, they write a book or if they’re really ambitious, maybe they make a video or a movie, but you decided to make a bottle. And in the book you tell a story about going to see that wonderful movie, “Hidden Figures,” and a lesson that came to you from seeing that. Can you tell us that story?

Fawn Weaver:

Absolutely. Well, I actually went with some of Nearest’s descendants that from Tullahoma branch, and we were at the theater in Tullahoma and we just, I mean, the movie was done so brilliantly, and so we’re clapping, we’re cheering, we’re laughing, we’re crying, and we get to the end of it and we’re out in the lobby area. And I said to them, this is the kind of movie that we have to do. There was two heroes in that really truly, you had the three women who were the hidden figures, but then you also had Kevin Costner who without that role, we would’ve never even known they existed. And I said, you have something very similar with Nearest and Jack and Jack’s descendants and Nearest’s descendants. And this was really a true story of two heroes who is likely Jack Daniel, possibly the first known ally in business that we as African Americans have ever had. And then you had Nearest Green, and then you had both of their descendants. And so the ability to be able to secure his legacy in history around the world for every future generation, it would only happen with the thing that continues to be around hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years from now. And that will always be whiskey.

Charlie Melcher:

Lots of people start companies and find a character or a piece of history as their marketing tool. But one of the things I was really profoundly affected by was it was the opposite here. You were not getting Uncle Nearest so that you could have some character to put on your bottle. You were making a bottle to honor and cement the legacy of a real human being. And how easy was it to start a spirits company?

Fawn Weaver:

I don’t think you can put ease in it anywhere. I think on a scale of difficulty from one to a hundred, it would definitely hang somewhere around 90. And the only reason I wouldn’t give it above 90 is because I didn’t have to be in the middle of a shootout, literally a physical shootout. Like in other countries, you might be trying to start a business and someone might come by your house with machine guns, but otherwise, if you remove that piece from it, and it’s just the level of difficulty in business, there are a few industries more difficult than the liquor business because in the liquor business, I can’t sell directly to the consumer. I can’t even sell directly to the person selling to the consumer. I sell to a second tier, which is our distributors. Our distributors then sell to restaurants, bars, retailers, hotels, amusement parks, and then they sell to the consumer.

And so you have in most businesses, you can go direct. Even if you have retailers that you sell your products through, you do have the ability to go to them directly. And you do have the ability through your own website to be able to sell to the consumer directly. When you’re in the alcohol business, you do not have that ability, and then you have an entire second tier that has never had a person leading in it that is a woman or a person of color ever. So that is a challenge because there’s a lack of familiarity with how we move, how we breathe, how we do things. And so every single conversation can be a challenge in that tier because you’re having to not only push them them accountable, but you’re also having to teach them.

Charlie Melcher:

I know when you were starting out, and you talk a lot about just how difficult it is to start in an industry that’s dominated by a handful of behemoths, really big players, and they’re spending millions and millions of dollars on marketing every year. And here you are a startup with not the capital to be able to go do that. And you describe how the way you were able to work around that was to be able to tell stories that would authentically attract audiences and get the kind of earned media that a good story on a heartfelt, a true story could attract. And that was a way to neutralize a little bit or to compete with and fight against. It was your stone to throw against the giant. And because you knew how to tell this story in a way that would be authentic and true and resonate for people, you were able to get all of that attention and overcome the millions of dollars you didn’t have to spend.

Fawn Weaver:

The thing about earned media is when you’re talking about a product, people get this wrong a lot. My background is in PR, it was my first company 30 years ago. And what people get wrong is they think that when they send out a press release, they’re expecting that the press is going to pick it up because the press should be excited about their product as they are. But there’s only so many members of the press, and there are millions of products and books and stories and things that are being pitched to them all the time. And their job is not to tell our story. Our job is to tell our story. Their job is to get more listeners, more viewers, more readers. And so I took the approach with Uncle Nearest, and I’ve always taken this approach with earned media is how do I get them more of what they need? What can I do? And that meant telling the story of Uncle Nearest from so many different angles and being able to constantly deliver stories that got them more eyeballs.

Charlie Melcher:

So when you are out there telling this story, and for example in sales, how important is the story and how do you frame the story of Uncle Nearest when someone’s going into a bar and introducing a salesperson on your teams going in there, what is the question they ask or how do they present it? Well,

Fawn Weaver:

Everybody presents it completely different. I can tell you the way that I presented it when I was going out and doing sales is I would begin by asking whoever it was that was the buyer, look at your back bar. So whether that’s a restaurant, a hotel, a retail store, look in here and look at all these bourbons that you are selling lights out and tell me which one of these is not named after in recognition of a white man. Now we’re in a country that’s 70% people of color, and so they should have at least one that they could identify just by beginning with that. It became an aha moment. And then I would always go into the story of our awards. And the reason I would do that is because I believe that’s its own story. The fact that when we came into this industry, people told us no one in the spirits industry, the consumers don’t care about awards.

They care about that in wine. Wine consumers care about it, but they don’t care about awards in spirits. And there was this one particular spirit competition, San Francisco World Spirits, and if you got the top prize, then they would say, well, that’ll move the needle. So everyone would submit to that particular competition. But they’d say, but outside of that, consumers don’t care. And I beg to differ. I said, well, they may not care about an award, but if we come out of the gate and we become the most awarded bourbon in the world, people will care. We began submitting Uncle Nearest to every award competition around the world before we ever shipped a bottle out for consumers. Now you have, our entire campaign is built on the fact that we’re the most awarded bourbon in American whiskey of 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. We’ve kept that campaign the entire time. I always begin with that because the thing about a story which is important for anyone with a product to remember is a story will sell one product. It will not get a repeat customer. So I start with the two things that create the repeat customer, and then the story is the wow that closes it out. So consider the story of Uncle Nearest, the story of Nearest Green, consider that the closer, and that’s how I approach it.

Charlie Melcher:

Let me dive a little bit into your relationship with Nearest Green and how you, after so many years now of studying him, of learning everything there is to know about him, and as an author, if you will, of his story, your lives are intertwined. There’s a merging of those stories. But when I was reading the book again, I kind of felt more like maybe your spiritual forebear isn’t Nearest Green, but maybe more Jack Daniel.

Fawn Weaver:

There’s no question about it. We’re both entrepreneurs, both left home very early, both rebellious did things our own way. I felt an immediate connection to Jack just because of our past in life weren’t too dissimilar. I’ve always gotten the sense that Nearest doesn’t care about all this, that Jack is the one who cares that his mentor and his teacher be honored much more than Nearest. And in that regard, nearest and I are very similar because I don’t care if anybody remembers my name after I’m gone. The book is equal parts, Nearest’s story, Jack’s story, and my own, because when you look at our, how we all began and how we all are, they ended, and where I am, when you look at our lives, they’re all such improbable risings. So if you take Jack for instance, you have a person who at the age of four months old, his mom contracts typhus fever.

Seven days later, she’s dead. He’s the 10th child. His father has no idea what to do with one child, let alone 10 children. He’s wet nurse by his next door neighbor. His father remarries pretty quickly because in those days, men didn’t know how to raise kids. So that’s what they did. They went and found a new mother, and the new mother is not a fan of Jack. And so we find Jack working as a chore boy at seven years old on a neighboring farm, and the work he’s doing isn’t glamorous at all. It is going and fetching water for the family from the wells. It’s feeding slop to pigs, it’s taking care of the cows, milking the cows. And so to go from that to becoming the most famous whiskey maker in the world is pretty astounding. And he actually did it through awards and pr, which is the irony of it all.

There’s so many things that I do, exactly. There’s so many things that I do and people go, oh my gosh, that’s brilliant. I’m like, yeah. So I got that from Jack, not Jack Daniel’s the company, but Jack Daniel the man. So that’s one of the benefits of having studied him so well is I can replicate some of the stuff did. And it works. It still works to this day. It’s quite fantastic. And then you have Nearest, you have his story of a person who was formerly enslaved and he became this really skilled distiller. And on the other side of the Civil War, he’s living in a property and when you look through the records, he has more wealth than his white neighbors to this day, if you compare Nearest’s descendants and Jack’s descendants, Nearest’s descendants fared much better in terms of success, in terms of money, in terms of every actual metric you will utilize for comparing families, Nearest’s family fared better.

Charlie Melcher:

And really this is a book in some deep way about a friendship, about a relationship. We keep talking about it as being a book about Nearest, but actually it’s about what came from a kind of mutual respect and friendship between those two men and how it played out through time, through the descendants. And in fact, the entire community, tell me if I’m right here or not, but I felt like one of the messages you were making was that because of that relationship, that mutual respect, right? Nearest actually taught Jack about distilling and then became the first master distiller for him. And that created a friendship and a mutual respect that permeated down through the generations of their descendants that actually set the tone for a kind of racial harmony in that town that lasted to this day.

Fawn Weaver:

Even nurse’s, great-great granddaughter, who’s our master blender, Victoria Eady Butler. She will tell you she never experienced racism until she left Lynchburg and one of Nearest’s great granddaughters who has now passed away, but I spent a good amount of time with her in the early years of me writing this book, and she was able to help me piece a lot of things together. And where she experienced racism was once she moved to Indianapolis. What I love is the juxtaposition between what is and what people think is, and to be able to write about that and the nuance of that, I absolutely loved being able to do that.

Charlie Melcher:

I mean, you just think about the name of the town and it makes you cringe. Right? For someone who doesn’t know Lynchburg– where did it get that name in the south? And yet–

Fawn Weaver:

Yeah, I think for me, I wasn’t— my husband didn’t like the name at all, obviously as a Black man, but because my Chief Business Officer who’s now been with me about 10 years, she was an SVP of sales for another company that I was invested in. Before that, I always knew her as Kate Lynch. So I already had familiarity with how common that name is in Ireland. And so you have so many Irish people that are here that are named Lynch. So it wasn’t odd to me, especially in a town that is set up near limestone water that the Irish would make a home of it.

Charlie Melcher:

Okay. So we’ve talked a bit about the relationship between the two and the respect that they had and how that played down. And many members of Nearest’s family stayed involved in the distillery and Jack Daniel’s company and still do to this day. Tell me about the relationship that you had with Brown Foreman, that’s this giant player and they own the intellectual property, if you will, of Jack Daniels, and here you are trying to start a distillery in the same town or the next town over, and you’re in the same business telling the story of Nearest Green, the first distiller for Jack Daniels. How did you navigate that relationship and particularly around the issues of intellectual property without having them just squash you like a bug?

Fawn Weaver:

It was a lot of landmines that I had to make sure I didn’t trip up the power of storytelling and the power of earned media. It would’ve been terrible for them to try to squash me, right? Because the headline would’ve read, “The maker of Jack Daniels sues the maker of the namesake of his first master distiller, a formerly enslaved man.” It just would’ve, it would not have been a good look for them. And so from that perspective, I think that they were smart in how they handled it and just kind of, let’s look at this. Let’s wait and see. I also appreciate that they understood it was not their story to tell. It was never their story to tell their story is Jack Daniel, but they had a very long time to be able to tell the story of Nearest Green, and they chose not to. They all knew about him and they chose not to.

And so me coming to the forefront, I do appreciate that they understood, just because I’ve come along doesn’t now make it their story to tell, but no, it is, our relationship is great. We do things together not from a business standpoint, but not for profit and trying to diversify our industry and trying to uphold the legacies that Nearest and Jack left for us. I don’t look at them as competition, and they do their best not to look at me as competition, but when you’ve been in the industry as long as they have, they kind of look at everyone as competition. So it’s a little abnormal for them to say Everybody’s competition, except we’re going to have this carve out for Uncle Nearest. It doesn’t work that way. And so they do see us as competition just because that’s the nature of how they treat everybody in the industry. But I do think that we have a mutual respect for each other because of the namesakes of our companies

Charlie Melcher:

And your book’s called “Love & Whiskey.” It’s not called Battle and Whiskey or Competition and Whiskey, and it’s a book about friendship and love and allies. And I feel like that spirit and the way you’ve shown up telling this story enabled them to see you as an ally and not just as a competitor.

Fawn Weaver:

Well, and I also think them seeing their founders characteristics and being able to see that he was such a giving person, that he was a collaborative person, that he was the first person to help someone. It was interesting because one, many of the documents that I uncovered were all these loan notes. I mean, Jack loaned everybody money, and upon his death, he left a very clear instructions that no one was to collect any of the debts. They were all canceled at the moment he died. That giving nature is something that I believe that even the company having read about it or talked to me for many years now about it, that they’re also trying to get back to the ideals of their founder. And if you get back to the ideals of your founder, then you can be nothing but excited for the growth of Uncle Nearest and Nearest Green receiving his rightful place in history.

Charlie Melcher:

I had never thought of it this way, but in the book you talk about how whiskey making is inherently a forward looking endeavor because you’re putting away barrels of things that might not be ready to be shared with the world for 15 or 20 years, and at some point you’re going to be putting away barrels that you’re not going to be around to see. I clearly see that in your work and in the way you approach this business, and even in terms of the partnership you created with Jack Daniels between Uncle Nearest and Jack Daniels. Just tell us for a minute about that nonprofit alliance that you have and the work that it’s doing.

Fawn Weaver:

Absolutely. The Nearest and Jack Advancement Initiative, when we came into the industry, when Uncle Nearest came in, there were one or two people of color that were really even trying in the industry. For the most part, it was just known that you can’t succeed. And so people would come in and they’d tap out almost as quickly as they came in. For us, with the Nearest and Jack Advancement Initiative, we began just collaborating creatively on how do we diversify this industry? How do we raise people up, but not in a way that we won’t see the fruits of our labor for 20 years? And so we began creating different initiatives. Every year, “Our Spirits on the Rise,” we invite, if you are black or brown founder of a spirit brand, you are invited out for two full days, and we bring down the walls, the gatekeepers in this industry, they all show up so that these founders can talk to them directly.

They can ask them questions directly. The first day is at Jack Daniels and the second day is at Nearest Green Distillery. And so that’s “Our Spirits on the Rise.” And then we also, although it’s not been announced yet that the governor signed off on it, we’ve been working together for the last four years, and I was working on it for about a year or so before then, the Nearest Green Academy of Distilling, it’ll be the first degree program in this country that is an associate’s degree in distilling, and that is— the actual core classes for it are happening at Nearest Green Distillery in terms of the on-hand type of portion of it, the lab, if you will, but it is housed at Motlow State College. It’s their degree program. And so we are working together on that. Two generations from now, no one will even know that this was once an industry that had no people of color in any leadership position whatsoever.

Charlie Melcher:

I feel that the book has this underlying message that the history of our country is not what we thought it was. That’s maybe the lesson in a way, that there’s a message of respect of an understanding of the contributions of enslaved people to our country of a value of diversity. That was one of the things that drew you to this story and to wanting to tell it and to not just tell it, but to build a business that represented it.

Fawn Weaver:

Our American history is nuanced. We want everything to be black and white. And I’m not talking about race, I’m talking about just in general. We want everything to fall neatly into one section or another section into one camp or another camp. And people forget how young we are as a country. Democracy is an experiment. We are still trying to figure this thing out and how our country came to be. I mean, there’s older than us, and I think that because when you grow up in America, there’s such a focus on America that we forget how young we are and youth make a lot of foolish decisions. But to continue to hold our country hostage because of mistakes that we made in the past is not wise. But also it’s important to see the nuance even in those situations that everyone did not fall into one camp or the other.

You had plenty of people that were our allies. So one of the best examples that I can think of is when you think of Selma, the first time those African-Americans attempted to cross that bridge, it became bloody Sunday. They were absolutely beat. And then Martin Luther King Jr. Got wind of it, of course, and said, y’all need cameras. So the thing about MLK is the reason why he was so powerful, other than the fact that he could storytell is when he showed up, people would say The circus is in town. What they meant was he’s coming with reporters. And so was always showing up with people who were going to capture the story, people who were generally white, who wanted to make sure that this stuff was not happening in a way that people could turn a blind eye and pretend it wasn’t going on.

No, no, you’re going to see this. And so we like to write out the allies out of the story. Harriet Tubman, her whole story is a story of allies. The people who were willing to hide her, the white people that were willing to hide her in the basement and to help her. And so we have a country in which we have always had allies, but for whatever reason, we want to keep writing those allies out because the beginning was so brutal. But you do have white people that came along and said, I know that we’re saying that this is okay, but this just isn’t okay. And they risked their own lives. Jack was one of those people. So one of the reasons I love telling this story is I believe that the reason why Lynchburg became a town in which if you’re racist, you better move to the city next door, is because you had Jack who was the big man in town, although he is only five foot four, five foot two with his lifts, he was about 5, 3, 5 4, but he was five foot two, but he was still the big man in town, and he always had black people around during the time of Jack’s era.

And immediately following his era, you have a city that’s about 25, 30, 25, 30% African-American, yet the workforce at Jack Daniel Distillery, the best job in the area, in the entire area, not just the best job in Lynchburg, the best job in the entire area was Jack Daniel Distillery, and his workforce was 50% black. And so I think that we have to remember that through this journey that every person who has ever made great progress for African-Americans in this country, we’ve always had allies.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, that message comes through beautifully in the book. I think it comes through even more beautifully in your life and the model that you present to everyone. And so I just wanted to say thank you for being who you are, for the success that you’ve had for the book that you’ve written, and for the good fight that you fight every day, building that brand and spreading that message. And it’s an honor to know you and be involved. So thank you.

Fawn Weaver:

Well, and thank you for publishing my book. It was without question in the right hands because it took a level of nuance of understanding that this was a book that was written for everyone. It wasn’t written for any particular group, it wasn’t written for any particular gender. If you are a person with any level of heart, it was written for you and you all got that. Your team got that immediately, and I could not be more grateful that we were able to put this out.

Charlie Melcher:

Big hug to you.

Fawn Weaver:

Thank you. Big hug right back.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the FoST Podcast. Thanks for listening, my heartfelt thanks as well to Fawn Weaver for joining me today. To learn more about the incredible story behind Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey, I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of Love & Whiskey, available everywhere that books are sold.

If you enjoy the Future of StoryTelling Podcast, we’d so appreciate it if you’d leave us a nice review and share it with a friend for even more insights from the world’s best storytellers, be sure to subscribe and check out our website at fost.org where you can sign up for our free monthly newsletter. The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media, in collaboration with our talented friends and production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.